For the past few years, I've used Carrd.co to host a simple one-page portfolio site. It worked well, and I didn't want the overhead of managing a WordPress install or to spend time figuring out Ghost. That's changed with the rapid improvement in AI coding tools. I needed a project to test a few things out, and completely redoing my site seemed a perfect fit.
This is also something that's been on my mind for a while. I've been focused on professional work since around 2020. It's been lucrative working more for tech companies than consumer publications, but I can't say it hasn't taken some of the fun out of writing. Restarting a blog gives me an opportunity to write about the things that interest me (and, hopefully, you) rather than be too worried about SEO, keywords, and affiliate links.
I also wanted a place to upload my photography that isn't controlled by Meta and to highlight some of the other things I'm working on. This site will grow as I figure out what I really want to do with it, so consider it very much a work in progress.
For those curious about the tech side of things, the site was mainly built with Claude Code. It runs on Next.js 16 (App Router, React 19) deployed on Vercel. Content lives in Supabase (Postgres). Images are stored in Cloudflare R2 and served via images.harryguinness.com with on-the-fly resizing through Cloudflare Image transformations. The frontend is styled with Tailwind CSS v4.
Publishing is markdown-first: I write a .md file locally, run a script, and it uploads images to R2, writes the HTML to Supabase, and triggers an ISR revalidation on Vercel. There's no CMS dashboard.
In other words, I'm in control of how everything works. It's been fun digging into Claude Code's capabilities and creating the kind of blog I want—rather than having to live with whatever decisions a product manager made in an office in San Francisco.
